With the increasing desire to carry smaller and smaller personal communicating devices with optimum functionality such as pagers, cellular phones, and other personal communicator devices, and the desire to automate homes through combinations of telecommunications and cable where smart rooms will have one or more small devices that operate a variety of appliances or control a variety of applications; the need and desire to enter alphanumeric text through non-alpha or numeric keypad is ever increasing.
In the United States of America it is standard for every telephone keypad to have letters as well as numerals displayed on the keys. Thus, the key representing the numeral "2" has the letters A, B and C displayed and the key representing the numeral "3" has the letters D, E and F etc. It is common to represent a telephone number by the letters which correspond to the digits on the keypad. Thus, for example, a railway company with the name "Amtrack" can acquire the telephone number 268 7225 and can advertise to customers that the company's telephone number can be dialed by activating the keys with the letters A-M-T-R-A-C-K. Dialing these letters will result in only one digital sequence, but one digital sequence can be represented by many letter sequences.
In the telecommunications field, methods of name selection are known which use a numeric keypad. For example, it is known in a voice mail system to select a user's voice mailbox by keying in from a remote telephone the first few letters of a user's name, as a result of which a short digit stream is delivered to the voice mail system. The voice mail system compares the input digit stream with a limited set of options in a look-up table. Sufficient digits must be entered to uniquely identify the desired user. Similarly, automated customer service systems can use this form of text entry. For example an airline information system can request the first three letters of a destination airport and, notwithstanding ambiguities in the letters to be represented by the digits delivered, it can uniquely identify an airport from only three digits because it has a limited "dictionary" of airport names from which to seek a match. The same approach can be used in a telephone speed-dial look up arrangement. A name can be selected from a limited list of names stored in a telephone terminal and a number can be dialed associated with the name selected.
Various other approaches for entering alphanumeric input through a non-alpha, numeric only, or other type of keypad having fewer keys or buttons than the corresponding alphabet have been developed or are known. Many of these methods take advantage of the letters displayed on the standard US telephone keypad. However, often the methods associated with the alphanumeric text through the keypad are cumbersome and difficult to edit. In addition, typically the entry must be restricted or entered in a specific manner such that there is only one option per sequence of input. More specifically, there is a direct correlation for a specific input to a specific letter of the alphabet or a symbol. For example, if a user wants to input the word "call" through a non-alpha keyboard, the user has to enter a specific combination of numbers and/or symbols to indicate the word call. By way of example for a user to enter the word call the user must enter the following: 2***; 2*; 5***; 5***; #. Such a method of inputting is very restrictive, time consuming, and editing is difficult and slow.
Therefore a need exists to provide a user with a simple straightforward method and apparatus for inputting alphanumeric text through a non-alpha, numeric, or other keypad having fewer keys than the desired alphabet; and the need exists to provide a system that is not restrictive to direct correlation or a specialized domain, i.e. where a variety of choices are available and easily input.
Various preferred embodiments of the invention are now described, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings.